Electronic equipment conventionally comprises an enclosure such as a box-shaped housing containing electronic circuitry. In some instances, a face of such a housing is open so as to provide access to shelves, each of which may be configured with receiving stations for holding electronic circuitry units or circuit packs in a side-by-side or top-to-bottom relationship. Typically, such units comprise at least one circuit substrate such as a printed circuit board or card carrying a plurality of electronic components. When installed into such a housing, one or more of these units may be connected to electrical connectors mounted within the housing. Each of the electronic circuitry units may provide particularized or dedicated functionality for the end user, and this may permit the user to configure a given housing in a modular or customized manner.
In certain types of electrical equipment, for instance in telecommunications networking equipment, it would be desirable to have a mechanism that would permit two or more circuit substrates such as printed circuit boards to be releasably interconnected together. Such an arrangement would allow for various configurations of printed circuit boards to be interchanged with each other in a given enclosure therefor. Moreover, it would be desirable to have a mechanism that would permit two or more component circuit substrates such as printed circuit boards to be releasably interconnected together in a multipart circuit assembly while permitting one of the boards to be removed from a given enclosure therefor and the other of the boards to remain installed and operational therein. It would moreover be desirable to have a mechanism that would permit the said two or more component circuit substrates to be removed from a given enclosure therefor either as an interconnected unit or with one of the component circuit substrates being removable therefrom independently of the component circuit substrates to which the removable component circuit substrate may be attached.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a mechanism which would permit two or more component circuit substrates to be releasably interconnected together, such that at least one of said component circuit substrates was removable from an enclosure therefor independently of the other component substrates to which the removable component substrate may be connected.
These and other objects of the present invention will be made apparent by way of the description of the invention which follows.